


Heart become kingfisher, soul become owl

by lurknomoar



Series: Bits and Pieces and Older Writings [1]
Category: Digger (Webcomic)
Genre: Epilogue, Gen, Some snippets on the post-canon lives of the Digger cast
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-26
Updated: 2019-08-26
Packaged: 2020-09-27 02:37:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 763
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20400313
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lurknomoar/pseuds/lurknomoar
Summary: The story is over, but stories go on: the living keep living and the dead are remembered.





	Heart become kingfisher, soul become owl

Digger lives a busy, but completely unremarkable wombat’s life, once she gets home. She gets to work digging and building. She’ll have a spouse, maybe a few other spouses depending on how the first one works out, eventually a bunch of kids. She’ll be kind and patient and take no shit from anybody, and she’ll talk about her travels only when someone asked her to. (Having an embarrassingly adventurous past is surprisingly common amongst wombats, after all the world always needs someone level-headed to clean up its messes.) After her death, Digger will be remembered for the tunnels criss-crossing the ground around the warren’s new hospital. They seem random and unnecessarily convoluted, but when flooded with the waters of the nearby hotwater spring, they give off just the right amount of heat to warm the aching bones of the convalescent.

* * *

Murai is a hero, isn’t she? Ganesh already said that one day she will decide the fate of the world, but he didn’t mention that she will do it multiple times. It’s sort of her day job. She travels with Captain Jhalm, and nominally they are still Veiled, devout followers of all gods’ wills, but in practice, they end up being quite the opposite. They are watchmen, and heaven is their jurisdiction: if a god were to fail in their duty or abuse their power, they have Sergeant Murai to deal with. After all, she has had experience with killing and birthing gods. She created a goddess, looked her in the face and went mad at the sight, all before she was a grown woman: she knows fear, and she reserves it for the Dark Mother, she wastes it on no other. Jhalm and her look after each other like brother and sister, carefully guarding the evil within the other.

* * *

Grim-Eyes is a good hunt leader, if a little too rash, a little too bloodthirsty. But she learns, slowly and with much grumbling: she learns from Digger’s example and from the stories about a brave distant relative named Ed Demon-killer. (She knows he’s her father, but she quite never admits it, not even to herself.) As she ages, she learns to ‘do the thing’ the way Boneclaw Mother does, and talk people into doing exactly what she wants them to do. With a few decades of experience and listening, plus a good knowledge of poisons, Grim-Eyes might make a good matriarch.

* * *

Surka swears an eternal oath of alliance to the hyenas, then gets bored and leaves a few months later to find New Adventure. She predictably has a string of weird picaresque adventures, becoming a courier, a highwayshrew and a lacemaker in the process. She teams up with Herne to find the antidote for being a stag. She gathers a herd of rogue winged rats, and drives them around like a cowgirl. Cowshrew? Shrews don’t live very long, so she will spend her old age as the Rath Hag’s familiar, being the only person who’s capable of matching her belligerence.

* * *

The Shadowchild’s fate one simply cannot fathom. It has eaten and absorbed a portion of ancient evil power, and then it has chosen to take upon itself the responsibility for all its kind. It tries to protect and teach feral baby demons, and all it has to go on is Digger’s advice, which is mostly ‘I don’t know, just do the best you can.’ If everything goes well, eventually there will be a rather large family of shadowy beings in the world, all of whom follow a super weird, but ultimately benevolent moral system.

* * *

And Ed. Oh, Ed. He was terrified and helpless and he did something very brave, and at the cost of his life, he somehow redeemed the original sin of the hyenas. A hyena who for the crime of He-Is suffered abuse, grief and exile was the one who succeeded in freeing He-Is from Sweetgrass Voice, even though it meant killing the both of them: in the long run, this is bound to have an effect on hyena cosmology. Maybe a few generations later, the young hyenas will start telling tales about a new deity, a scrawny male named He-Is-Fearful. He is smaller than She-Is-Fiercer, he is weaker, slower, cowardly. His claws are blunt, and yet he disembowels demons when he has to, for in his heart there is nothing but love and loyalty. He takes the first-born with him, to live in his hut and run with him through the tall grass. He is the god of males, of mating, of hospitality, of all unexpected, unasked-for kindnesses, of skin-painting.


End file.
